PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You might have come across discussions or blog posts suggesting that PostgreSQL’s built-in full-text search (FTS) struggles with performance compared to dedicated search engines or specialized extensions. A notable recent example comes from Neon’s blog post, “Performance Benchmark: pg_search on Neon” (link).

In their benchmark, Neon compared query performance on their database platform with their pg_search extension (based on Rust’s Tantivy library via pgrx) against the Postgres built-in fulltext search setting with tsvector and GIN index. They commendably stated they optimized this standard setup by adding GIN indexes where appropriate (benchmark code available here).

bm25 on Vchord

PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)